Have questions about publishing, growing, or going paid on Substack?
The Substack team, and your fellow writers, are here to help!
We’re gathering the writer community and members of the Substack team together in this discussion thread to answer writer questions for an hour. Drop your questions in the thread by leaving a comment, and we’ll do our best to share knowledge and tips.
Our team will be answering questions and sharing insights with you in the thread today from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. - 2 p.m. EDT. We encourage writers to stick around after the hour and continue the conversation together.
Some updates and reminders from the Substack team:
More ways to customize your publication homepage. Instead of having your publication name displayed in one of the default Substack fonts, you can now upload a file of your publication title in your own style. The image file should be should be at least 1024×256 pixels, with a maximum aspect ratio of 21:4. Visit “Set up the basics” in your settings page to upload a custom wordmark and see it in action on The Hyphen by Emma Gannon’s homepage:
Serialization tools. This new tool allows readers to tap forward and back between your posts. In your settings, you can now “Enable previous & next post links.” When a reader finishes a post they will be prompted, like a book, to choose to move forward or back.
We often use Office Hours as an opportunity to tell you about new features and updates that are made on Substack, in real time. We’ve got a lot cooking and want to be sure we most effectively communicate what’s new with you. Tell us: how would you like us to share new features and updates with you going forward?
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Got questions about Substack or feedback about what’s new? You’re in the right place! Leave a comment in this thread.
Next Thursday, we’ll take a break from Office Hours to hold our monthly Shoutout Thread. Come ready to share what you’ve been reading and inspired by recently on Substack. Save it to your calendar so you don’t miss it.
In case you missed it: Today, the Substack network is driving more than 40 percent of all subscriptions across the platform, and 12 percent of paid subscriptions.
As part of our ongoing effort to help writers grow, we’ve also just launched an early beta of Substack Boost, our most energetic investment to date in helping writers accelerate their growth.
I'm curious to hear more about how you learn about new features and updates on Substack. And, how would you like us to share new features and updates with you going forward?
I am signing off late today! Thanks for joining today's conversation. We saw some great questions around Boost and the new features in addition to other product feedback. Our teams are listening and will have more to share in the comings weeks.
Thanks for writing on Substack! See you next week for shoutout thread.
- Katie, Bailey, Chris P, Jamil, Chris M, Annie, Ben, Seth, and Jared
Hello all, and happy Office Hours! Here's a little bit of encouragement from one small newsletter to all of you: as difficult as it is to deal with "crickets" when you post, no/low engagement doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't working, as long as it's working for YOU. These things take time! If you write what YOU truly want to write, the audience will show up. Build community, not numbers! Understand that some of your most avid readers may never comment, share, or hit the like button! But they'll show up, every time. Write for the silent few. Write for the faithful ones. Write for YOU! And never, ever give up! 🌿
Just want to say that I've been in a writer's slump for about a month, but I think the wind in my sails are slowly coming back! Sitting in a cozy bakery in drizzly Portland with a coffee and pastry during Writer Office hours is my new thang.
Dear lord I wasn’t aware of the new serialization tool until reading this. I’m publishing a serialized novel and have been going into each individual post and inserting a table of contents with updated links. I think I’ll keep doing this so that people can go to the very beginning from any post, or to the end if they need it, but I hope this saves me from having to update every single post just so that my readers can easily navigate to the next chapter. Thanks Substack!
I just launched my newsletter six weeks ago, but I wanted to express my gratitude to the Substack team and to this community. You've made every step of the process so straightforward. I love hearing about the new features and picking up various tips and tricks from the other writers in these threads. More than anything, I really appreciate the fact that this platform makes me feel like I'm in such good hands that all I have to do is concentrate on the writing. Thanks again, everyone.
The serialization tool is really exciting! I know a lot of fiction writers who will be excited about that one. And if you are writing fiction, you should join the Fictionistas community on Substack.
I love "previous" and "next" post link buttons! I just implemented them, and my newsletter, "moviewise: Life Lessons From Movies" is NOT serialized, but it's nice to allow readers to easily go to another article! THANK YOU SUBSTACK 🤗🥳
Really happy with the Substack experience since I joined in late 2020; proud to see how far it's come and how much enthusiasm is still rolling forward to new and better features, while staying true to the spirit of Substack and not kowtowing to include features from other services which would dilute the brand. The recent inclusion of the Media Assets feature, for instance, is a great touch!
Well, this poll is a little slanted because you're asking people who are coming into office hours. I'd think that would weigh this in favor of that answer. If I can't make office hours, I don't want to miss an update, so I'd say to both dashboard and office hours.
Would it be possible to gain visibility to read through rates for individual posts? For example, something that tells us 23% of your audience stopped reading this post at this paragraph. If you can't get that granular, then tell us percentages for people who finished reading the entire post? Some type of data like that. I hope you folks will consider providing us some type of information like that.
Super excited about serialization, since I just started a new 28-Day challenge called The Writer's Notebook! (https://valorieclark.substack.com/s/writers-notebook ) It'll be great to make it easy for people to go between challenge days!
Have just hit the 6 month anniversary of my newsletter Eat This Drink That and am celebrating with a flash sale this weekend. Hoping it will bring in more subscribers - after a really encouraging surge of signups they’ve definitely slowed over the past couple of months but the feedback from those who have signed up has been great. Do spread the word among anyone you think might enjoy getting the sort of hot restaurant, recipe and wine tips you’d share with your friends!
Hi everyone, I hope you're all doing well. How About This (Canada) and The Metropolitan (UK) did an essay exchange this week where we wrote about the influences of each country on the youth of the other country. Great fun, I think you'll enjoy them:
I like the serialization tool! Note that you can use it even if you are not running a serial of any kind.
If you have a lot of posts on a similar theme, you can set them up so that people can with one click go from one to the next.
I saw this for the first time, I think, on Mr Money Mustache's website, where he had a link called "start here" for new readers. They could then binge-read in some sort of order. I then set up mini-tutorials on my website, like this one - http://www.yudkin.com/ordinary.htm.
Now my mind is churning about how I can implement this idea on my Substack, Introvert Upthink (https://www.introvertupthink.com). The idea is, you create a reader path instead of coaxing them to click around randomly.
I seem to be missing out on the whole growth through Substack thing. I'm getting a few new readers but not many. Is this something that mostly benefits big newsletters? Or do I need to be more actively involved with recommendations? Also a question about the app, is an android version coming any time or it will be iphone only?
I get my news about substack from writer office hours. The other thing I like about this session is that I find new writers. For whatever reason the “discover” click never produces writers I enjoy reading, but coming here today I found some pretty interesting (to me) subscribes! Thanks for being here!
Hooray for serialization navigation! I am so excited! I just wonder - will these work if your novel is contained within a section and you publish posts outside of that section, or will it look for the next/previous post in the entire Substack?
Really excited about the serialization aspect! I’m a Substack newbie but have been writing for years. Decided to bring my efforts here and am so delighted by how motivated I am to produce content on a consistent basis. The one thing I’ve never been able to grasp is capturing an audience. As someone who is rather shy about putting my work out there, I am wondering how other writers managed to overcome that (as I’m sure I’m not the only one)
I am going to test out a long form post this next issue on overcoming hardship and failure and promote the hell out of it, will share results as opposed to shorter and more direct posts. I am interested in seeing the results.
Hi everyone. I know this has been said before, but I can't stress enough about how it would be helpful to support markdown. Many of us write outside the app in dedicated tools that use markdown (Ulysses, iA Writer, Mars Edit, ...). Copy and paste in rich text is just not good enough (footnotes and links get mangled).
Additionally, it would be great to have multi-user support in the editor once an article is uploaded, so two or more editors can work simultaneously - back and forth editing is so 90s ;)
Lastly, an easy-to-implement API to allow those apps to directly post to Substack. They already do this for the likes of WordPress.
Hi! Fairly new Substack writer here. I'm interested to know where people are doing their networking/advertising to find more people who would be interested in their work.
Would it be more valuable to use my time to post more (currently I post about once a week), or to build a presence outside of substack to build an audience?
Speaking of new features, I have some requests. Although I know they are more advanced types of requests.
1) The ability to send out at least two different headline and header images of a newsletter, so I can do A/B testing. I have been consciously playing around with this stuff and it is helping engagement. But being able to do A/B testing would be ideal.
2) The ability to create a link that would allow me to make subscriber-only content available to anyone. But just for that story. Ideally, a feature similar to the one the Washington Post has, which allows paid subscribers to "gift" a linked story to someone.
3) I now have two different newsletters going out each day under the same account. And it's a bit confusing, because unless I am missing something, there isn't a way for me to tell how many people are subscribed to each newsletter.
Just wanted to stop by and thank the team at Substack for doing so much to make marketing our newsletters less time consuming. I remember suggesting as much earlier this year, and I'm thrilled to see you taking the feedback to heart—not that I'm surprised, however. You've always been awesome like that!
I'm loving doing guest posts and making new fans/subs in countries I'd never reached before! Before, What's Curation? (my newsletter) was drawing in readers from the US, Canada, and India. But now, I'm seeing readers from Europe as well! Also, almost at 200 subs. I'm not a huge "ME ME ME" guy, but it'll help if you can spread the word or come check me out and subscribe only if you think it's a fit for you. I have a great About page ;-)
Now if y'all excuse me, I'll be helping out in the comments below.
Hi all - does anyone know if we can add subscribers to just one section of our newsletter? Or do they have to (or do I have to) have them added to all at once? and then they unclick? I'm getting sign ups for my book and would like to have people added to just my book section and homepage section. Any suggestions? Alternatively, if I add someone or someone subscribes, can I then go in and manually unclick the sections they might not want? Thanks.
I would love the ability for the serialization tool to work within sub-newsletters, as I separate my ongoing serialized books into different sub-newsletters but don't necessarily publish those chapters consecutively, as I have other posts/articles in between.
No pertinent questions. Just wanted to leave a comment as a new writer hoping to gain some traction on my publications. Looking forward to growing with the Substack community.
Love all of what’s happening with Substack. It’s like a sonic boom of possibilities.
In the spirit of sharing, I wanted to recommend a book to our community here of Substackers. It’s called “Fascination” by Sally Hogsheads. A MUST READ for navigating todays world where (in the case of Substack) we are vying for the attention of readers among an infinity of other media outlets (including other Substackers) 😳
The serial buttons are just in time for a serial I’m publishing next month. I’m excited for all the new changes and must say this is an inspiring and dynamic community.
I also love that more customization is coming. We can really make a page ours and each Substack becomes a new experience. Will we be able to have music play when users visit?? Some platforms had that back in the day.
I have a writing process question and I'm curious to hear what others' experiences are.
When I started my Substack, it was a personal project in which I wrote and posted a short essay every Saturday. I ONLY worked on the essays on Saturdays, and posted them the same day, which both prevented me from spinning my wheels revising them all week and created some great deadline pressure to finish the piece to the best of my ability and just put it up. I actually think this is a great way to get started!
But I'm now really looking for more growth, and I'm thinking it might be better to write my essay in advance so that I can do things like choose pull quotes, create images for social media, and add images to the posts (which I hadn't been doing before.) But without the hard post deadline (my readers do expect and look forward to Saturday posts), I do spin my wheels and end up working on the piece until Saturday anyway.
For those who write posts in advance, do you have strategies you use to make sure you finalize them and don't keep fiddling with them until post time?
Hi Substack team! I love these new tools and features! Thank you for working so hard to help us share our work with readers.
I have a feature request. I'm wondering if it's possible to make the buttons dynamic? Right now, when I put up a subscribe button all of my readers see the same thing. That's great for new people, but kind of a waste for subscribers. I think the button they see actually says something like "manage subscription." But I'm wondering if it's possible for subscribers to see a different CTA in the same button. So for example, if you're a subscriber and logged in, you'd see a "share" button instead of a subscribe button. I think something like that would really help growth.
Please provide more detailed information about how stats are triggered.
Specifically, how an "open" is triggered?
Considering this is the metric you present to all writers, my investigation into it suggests it is the most misleading and inaccurate metric of all of the metrics relating to subscriber behaviour.
In no way does "open" relate to "read", when you talk to subscribers about what they actually do.
Looks to me like you're presenting a metric that can be machine triggered and/or has little meaning.
In case you missed it: Today, the Substack network is driving more than 40 percent of all subscriptions across the platform, and 12 percent of paid subscriptions.
As part of our ongoing effort to help writers grow, we’ve also just launched an early beta of Substack Boost, our most energetic investment to date in helping writers accelerate their growth.
You can read more about that in today's post: https://on.substack.com/p/growth
Drop any questions you have about Boost here and we'll do our best to answer.
I'm curious to hear more about how you learn about new features and updates on Substack. And, how would you like us to share new features and updates with you going forward?
I am signing off late today! Thanks for joining today's conversation. We saw some great questions around Boost and the new features in addition to other product feedback. Our teams are listening and will have more to share in the comings weeks.
Thanks for writing on Substack! See you next week for shoutout thread.
- Katie, Bailey, Chris P, Jamil, Chris M, Annie, Ben, Seth, and Jared
Hello all, and happy Office Hours! Here's a little bit of encouragement from one small newsletter to all of you: as difficult as it is to deal with "crickets" when you post, no/low engagement doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't working, as long as it's working for YOU. These things take time! If you write what YOU truly want to write, the audience will show up. Build community, not numbers! Understand that some of your most avid readers may never comment, share, or hit the like button! But they'll show up, every time. Write for the silent few. Write for the faithful ones. Write for YOU! And never, ever give up! 🌿
Just want to say that I've been in a writer's slump for about a month, but I think the wind in my sails are slowly coming back! Sitting in a cozy bakery in drizzly Portland with a coffee and pastry during Writer Office hours is my new thang.
Love the custom wordmark. Makes it feel more and more like my own publication ❤️
Hello 👋 Appreciate all y'all.
That's all I've got.
Dear lord I wasn’t aware of the new serialization tool until reading this. I’m publishing a serialized novel and have been going into each individual post and inserting a table of contents with updated links. I think I’ll keep doing this so that people can go to the very beginning from any post, or to the end if they need it, but I hope this saves me from having to update every single post just so that my readers can easily navigate to the next chapter. Thanks Substack!
I just launched my newsletter six weeks ago, but I wanted to express my gratitude to the Substack team and to this community. You've made every step of the process so straightforward. I love hearing about the new features and picking up various tips and tricks from the other writers in these threads. More than anything, I really appreciate the fact that this platform makes me feel like I'm in such good hands that all I have to do is concentrate on the writing. Thanks again, everyone.
The serialization tool is really exciting! I know a lot of fiction writers who will be excited about that one. And if you are writing fiction, you should join the Fictionistas community on Substack.
https://fictionistas.substack.com/
I love "previous" and "next" post link buttons! I just implemented them, and my newsletter, "moviewise: Life Lessons From Movies" is NOT serialized, but it's nice to allow readers to easily go to another article! THANK YOU SUBSTACK 🤗🥳
Really happy with the Substack experience since I joined in late 2020; proud to see how far it's come and how much enthusiasm is still rolling forward to new and better features, while staying true to the spirit of Substack and not kowtowing to include features from other services which would dilute the brand. The recent inclusion of the Media Assets feature, for instance, is a great touch!
Well, this poll is a little slanted because you're asking people who are coming into office hours. I'd think that would weigh this in favor of that answer. If I can't make office hours, I don't want to miss an update, so I'd say to both dashboard and office hours.
Would it be possible to gain visibility to read through rates for individual posts? For example, something that tells us 23% of your audience stopped reading this post at this paragraph. If you can't get that granular, then tell us percentages for people who finished reading the entire post? Some type of data like that. I hope you folks will consider providing us some type of information like that.
I would like everyone to know my stitches are coming out in a few hours and my dental ordeal is nearly over: https://jimruland.substack.com/p/the-savage-dentists
Super excited about serialization, since I just started a new 28-Day challenge called The Writer's Notebook! (https://valorieclark.substack.com/s/writers-notebook ) It'll be great to make it easy for people to go between challenge days!
Have just hit the 6 month anniversary of my newsletter Eat This Drink That and am celebrating with a flash sale this weekend. Hoping it will bring in more subscribers - after a really encouraging surge of signups they’ve definitely slowed over the past couple of months but the feedback from those who have signed up has been great. Do spread the word among anyone you think might enjoy getting the sort of hot restaurant, recipe and wine tips you’d share with your friends!
This came in late but I LOVE the new features Substack!
Serialisation is a great addition. Very handy for what I am writing, serialised sci-fi and fantasy with chapters every Tuesday and Thursday. Thanks!
Hope everyone is doing well this Thursday and I wish you all the best in your writing (and reading)!
Hi everyone, I hope you're all doing well. How About This (Canada) and The Metropolitan (UK) did an essay exchange this week where we wrote about the influences of each country on the youth of the other country. Great fun, I think you'll enjoy them:
Canadian influence on British youth (Oh Canada): https://howaboutthis.substack.com/p/the-metropolitan-guest-post-oh-canada
British influence on Canadian youth (The Secret Nine Point Plan to British Unwitting Gen X Canadians): https://www.themetropolitan.uk/p/guest-dykeman
I like the serialization tool! Note that you can use it even if you are not running a serial of any kind.
If you have a lot of posts on a similar theme, you can set them up so that people can with one click go from one to the next.
I saw this for the first time, I think, on Mr Money Mustache's website, where he had a link called "start here" for new readers. They could then binge-read in some sort of order. I then set up mini-tutorials on my website, like this one - http://www.yudkin.com/ordinary.htm.
Now my mind is churning about how I can implement this idea on my Substack, Introvert Upthink (https://www.introvertupthink.com). The idea is, you create a reader path instead of coaxing them to click around randomly.
I seem to be missing out on the whole growth through Substack thing. I'm getting a few new readers but not many. Is this something that mostly benefits big newsletters? Or do I need to be more actively involved with recommendations? Also a question about the app, is an android version coming any time or it will be iphone only?
I know there’s a separate conversation happening, but would love to hear more about Boost.
I get my news about substack from writer office hours. The other thing I like about this session is that I find new writers. For whatever reason the “discover” click never produces writers I enjoy reading, but coming here today I found some pretty interesting (to me) subscribes! Thanks for being here!
Hooray for serialization navigation! I am so excited! I just wonder - will these work if your novel is contained within a section and you publish posts outside of that section, or will it look for the next/previous post in the entire Substack?
Very handy! Thanks for these tips.
Love the nifty new tools and improvements!! Really encourages me to keep writing. Thanks Substack :)
Can someone tell me how to embed the "Buy me a coffee" image in clickable format. its doing my head in!
Really excited about the serialization aspect! I’m a Substack newbie but have been writing for years. Decided to bring my efforts here and am so delighted by how motivated I am to produce content on a consistent basis. The one thing I’ve never been able to grasp is capturing an audience. As someone who is rather shy about putting my work out there, I am wondering how other writers managed to overcome that (as I’m sure I’m not the only one)
I'm wondering: does Boost make sense if your newsletter doesn't have a paid subscription option yet?
I am going to test out a long form post this next issue on overcoming hardship and failure and promote the hell out of it, will share results as opposed to shorter and more direct posts. I am interested in seeing the results.
Hi everyone. I know this has been said before, but I can't stress enough about how it would be helpful to support markdown. Many of us write outside the app in dedicated tools that use markdown (Ulysses, iA Writer, Mars Edit, ...). Copy and paste in rich text is just not good enough (footnotes and links get mangled).
Additionally, it would be great to have multi-user support in the editor once an article is uploaded, so two or more editors can work simultaneously - back and forth editing is so 90s ;)
Lastly, an easy-to-implement API to allow those apps to directly post to Substack. They already do this for the likes of WordPress.
Hi! Fairly new Substack writer here. I'm interested to know where people are doing their networking/advertising to find more people who would be interested in their work.
Would it be more valuable to use my time to post more (currently I post about once a week), or to build a presence outside of substack to build an audience?
Speaking of new features, I have some requests. Although I know they are more advanced types of requests.
1) The ability to send out at least two different headline and header images of a newsletter, so I can do A/B testing. I have been consciously playing around with this stuff and it is helping engagement. But being able to do A/B testing would be ideal.
2) The ability to create a link that would allow me to make subscriber-only content available to anyone. But just for that story. Ideally, a feature similar to the one the Washington Post has, which allows paid subscribers to "gift" a linked story to someone.
3) I now have two different newsletters going out each day under the same account. And it's a bit confusing, because unless I am missing something, there isn't a way for me to tell how many people are subscribed to each newsletter.
I noticed that Substack recently purchased Yem—is Yem the power behind Boost? Or is this a separate initiative/service?
Just wanted to stop by and thank the team at Substack for doing so much to make marketing our newsletters less time consuming. I remember suggesting as much earlier this year, and I'm thrilled to see you taking the feedback to heart—not that I'm surprised, however. You've always been awesome like that!
I'm loving doing guest posts and making new fans/subs in countries I'd never reached before! Before, What's Curation? (my newsletter) was drawing in readers from the US, Canada, and India. But now, I'm seeing readers from Europe as well! Also, almost at 200 subs. I'm not a huge "ME ME ME" guy, but it'll help if you can spread the word or come check me out and subscribe only if you think it's a fit for you. I have a great About page ;-)
Now if y'all excuse me, I'll be helping out in the comments below.
Hi all - does anyone know if we can add subscribers to just one section of our newsletter? Or do they have to (or do I have to) have them added to all at once? and then they unclick? I'm getting sign ups for my book and would like to have people added to just my book section and homepage section. Any suggestions? Alternatively, if I add someone or someone subscribes, can I then go in and manually unclick the sections they might not want? Thanks.
Ooh, love both these new features!
I would love the ability for the serialization tool to work within sub-newsletters, as I separate my ongoing serialized books into different sub-newsletters but don't necessarily publish those chapters consecutively, as I have other posts/articles in between.
Love these new features, particularly excited about the ability to add a custom header to the home page!
No pertinent questions. Just wanted to leave a comment as a new writer hoping to gain some traction on my publications. Looking forward to growing with the Substack community.
Love all of what’s happening with Substack. It’s like a sonic boom of possibilities.
In the spirit of sharing, I wanted to recommend a book to our community here of Substackers. It’s called “Fascination” by Sally Hogsheads. A MUST READ for navigating todays world where (in the case of Substack) we are vying for the attention of readers among an infinity of other media outlets (including other Substackers) 😳
The serial buttons are just in time for a serial I’m publishing next month. I’m excited for all the new changes and must say this is an inspiring and dynamic community.
I also love that more customization is coming. We can really make a page ours and each Substack becomes a new experience. Will we be able to have music play when users visit?? Some platforms had that back in the day.
I dropdown New First :)
That is where all the action is, the fringe of Substack City 😅
What about you?
Basic question: how do you add subscriber quotes to the bottom of my welcome page? I am starting to see this on more stacks and love what it adds!
I have a writing process question and I'm curious to hear what others' experiences are.
When I started my Substack, it was a personal project in which I wrote and posted a short essay every Saturday. I ONLY worked on the essays on Saturdays, and posted them the same day, which both prevented me from spinning my wheels revising them all week and created some great deadline pressure to finish the piece to the best of my ability and just put it up. I actually think this is a great way to get started!
But I'm now really looking for more growth, and I'm thinking it might be better to write my essay in advance so that I can do things like choose pull quotes, create images for social media, and add images to the posts (which I hadn't been doing before.) But without the hard post deadline (my readers do expect and look forward to Saturday posts), I do spin my wheels and end up working on the piece until Saturday anyway.
For those who write posts in advance, do you have strategies you use to make sure you finalize them and don't keep fiddling with them until post time?
Also, I think these "Office Hours" would be more useful if you hosted a stream and answered questions from the chat.
This seems more like a product announcement with a comments thread than any sort of Q&A resource for Substack writers. I don't see much 'A' happening.
Hi Substack team! I love these new tools and features! Thank you for working so hard to help us share our work with readers.
I have a feature request. I'm wondering if it's possible to make the buttons dynamic? Right now, when I put up a subscribe button all of my readers see the same thing. That's great for new people, but kind of a waste for subscribers. I think the button they see actually says something like "manage subscription." But I'm wondering if it's possible for subscribers to see a different CTA in the same button. So for example, if you're a subscriber and logged in, you'd see a "share" button instead of a subscribe button. I think something like that would really help growth.
Fun to see every week something new. Will have to get cracking on that new header.
My question now that I was looking at settings: What is this one? "Enable colored links
Toggle between colored or black/underlined links"
It's probably obvious, but not to this luddite.
Thanks!
Neal
Substack,
Please provide more detailed information about how stats are triggered.
Specifically, how an "open" is triggered?
Considering this is the metric you present to all writers, my investigation into it suggests it is the most misleading and inaccurate metric of all of the metrics relating to subscriber behaviour.
In no way does "open" relate to "read", when you talk to subscribers about what they actually do.
Looks to me like you're presenting a metric that can be machine triggered and/or has little meaning.